Why we must join the dots between freshwater & marine impacts

Here at Bemari we are big on interconnected water impacts.

Understanding this inter-connectivity is critical for holistically reducing business water impacts. ‍

It is also useful for conducting the CSRD double materiality assessment that requires businesses to analyse their freshwater & marine impacts.

False binaries make it difficult to understand how direct impacts on freshwater may indirectly (but severely) impact marine ecosystems (+ coastal communities) and vice versa.

There are also shades of ecosystems between freshwater & marine which can get lost from the conversation when we create false binaries. Mangroves & salt marshes are a good example of these.

But how are freshwater and marine environments linked?

We understand it can be difficult to join the dots between freshwater impacts (rivers, lakes, etc.) and marine impacts (the coast, shallow waters & open ocean).

But remember, all rivers flow to the sea. So any commercial activity that changes a river's composition (e.g. removing water or sand or inserting chemical pollution) or course (e.g. building dams or towns), will likely have impacts downstream.

Here are two examples of this inter-connectivity:

• Globally, only 1,000 rivers are responsible for nearly 80% of marine plastic pollution
• Agricultural run-off & wastewater is the primary factor in creation 500 marine dead-zones (collectively covering an area greater than the UK). The majority of this pollution enters oceans via rivers.

How can my business start to think about interconnected water impacts?

There are two important factors your business can analyse to start to understand interconnected water impacts.

1. Operations & supply chain proximity to a water body

‍The closer a value chain activity is to a water body, the higher the likelihood that it will have an impact.

• A manufacturing plant along a river: is likely either drawing freshwater or releasing polluted water (or minimal regulation quality water) back into the river. Both of these actions potentially have downstream impacts including (1) drought along rivers and in coastal habitats (2) pollution in downstream river and sea.
• A hotel chain located by the sea: the construction of which will have likely damaged a coastal ecosystems, the supporting infrastructure like roads will pollute the sea through storm run-off and the hotel's water source likely has increased vulnerability to saline intrusion.

2. Product proximity to a water body

‍If your product or packaging ends up in a water body, how have you designed it to behave? Is it made of seaweed that will quickly disintegrate with no harm to its end of life location? Or is it made of plastic or a natural material that takes time to degrade like paper or wood?

Plastic pollution is a key driver of nature decline in rivers and the ocean.

• Birds ingest plastic, suffocate and die.
• Animals get entangled in plastic, can't move, starve and die.
• Corals are smothered by plastic and die.

And that's just the big bits of plastic. We still have no idea what the long-term effects of micro-plastics are marine life (or humans), but, guess what? So far science suggests it isn't a health tonic.

How my business start to act on interconnected water impacts?

Firstly, we recommend taking the time to acquaint yourself with the Source to Sea (S2) approach to the water cycle.

The S2S approach is grounded in the reality that what we do on land and in rivers, lakes and aquifers can have impacts further downstream along coasts and in the ocean... and vice versa.

It is an accessible, holistic framework for understanding freshwater and marine TOGETHER.

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Secondly, use the S2S' 'key flow framework' to get a sense of where your water impacts may be in your value chain.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Where in my value chain is water an input? What is the location of this water usage and where is the water coming from?
• Where in my value chain are your activities contributing to water pollution? What is the location of these polluting activities? What is downstream of the polluted water course?
• Does my business' value chain impacting sediment flows? If yes, which rivers sediment flows are being disrupted?
  • For example: do you use sand or aggregates in your value chain? If yes, where have they been dredged from and were they been sustainably sourced?
• What are the ecosystem services my business relies on? How are my business activities potentially reducing the efficacy of these ecosystem services?

Our only gripe with S2S, is that it hasn't yet properly embedded the socio-political elements of water, nor does it take into account social injustice and water.

However in the spirit of seeking solutions that are high accuracy & low precision, rather than low accuracy & high precision, we feel the best move forward is to better integrating social justice into S2S, rather than overlooking the approach, due to this current limitation. We will talk about the intersection of WASH and S2S in a future blog post.

If you would like to learn about how you can apply a Source to Sea approach to your business and how it can help you with CSRD, then please reach out at hello@bemari.co.uk

Written by Elspeth Alexander

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